Searching for: mechanics

The Fluid Mechanics of Planetary Atmospheres

February 16, 2015

In my last post I went over a really powerful bit of physics called fluid mechanics, which describes the flow of fluid through a system. The main equation in this framework is the momentum equation; the Navier-Stokes equation.This equation is nye on impossible to solve analytically in it’s full grotesque glory, so in the last post I discussed some of...

Some Fluid Mechanics Basics

January 23, 2015

At the moment I’m intently studying fluid mechanics for an exam on planetary science. As you may have guessed, the fluid mechanics in question is for modelling planetary atmospheres, but the mathematics is universally applicable. I’ve wanted to learn fluid mechanics for many years so I thought I’d just go through some of the basics...

An Undergrad Primer on Vectors

September 7, 2015

[Could not find the bibliography file(s) I wrote a post a while ago with my tips for people that are starting off a physics degree. Just after I published it a friend and fellow post graduate, Sam Cooper, pointed out to me that I made a fairly blaring omission in my summary of undergraduate physics. Vectors. I...

Modeling Atmospheres with the Unified Model

February 24, 2015

In my last couple of posts I’ve been going through some of the basic principles of fluid mechanics. From some of the basic approximations that make the equation possible to analytically solve in this post, to some more specialised theory in the context of planetary systems in this post. In these posts we’ve been slowly...

Radiative Transfer in Planetary Atmospheres: An Overview

January 1, 2015

A little while ago I got carried away on a little post which discussed a really cool little bit of physics called radiative transfer. As I said then, radiative transfer is a technique that you can use to study how energy, in the form of electromagnetic radiation, moves through material. In that post, which you can...

The Basics of Radiative Transfer

April 28, 2014

It’s deep in exam season for me at the moment, which means that if you try talking to me, chances are that I’ll have my head in a book. I talked a while back about solving radiative transfer problems with Monte Carlo methods, but I never actually went very far into how radiative transfer works....